Variations on Becoming
12′ x 10′ x 8′
Cedar
2020
2020 Fellowship Artist
Artist Statement
I am a Minneapolis based sculptor and gardener who creates spaces to experience rest, connection, and reflection between people and the natural environment. These spaces, simultaneously sculpture, gardens, and architecture, offer viewers a place to spend prolonged and open ended engagement with the environment they are situated within.
As a visual artist and gardener, I approach all of my work with the mindset of reciprocity, growth, and decay. Working with natural materials that break down and grow over time such as soil, cedar, and plants, allows me to engage in a collaborative relationship with them, giving the material the room to be an active participant. These works are constantly in a state of becoming, never completed upon the installation. Calling upon the conceptual qualities of the Mono-Ha movement as well as the formal qualities of minimalism and landscape architecture, my work reduces forms to basic shapes and compositions to center the experience on the relationship between material, body, and place.
Variations on Becoming is an abstract architectural space intended to facilitate a quiet, meditative engagement with the prairie that surrounds it. The inspiration for the structure came from sitting in a hunting blind for the first time in 2019. Bierlein was surprised by how, with silence, patience, and attentiveness, the world around the hunting blind became more visible to him than ever. The architectural space of the blind simultaneously removed him from, and connected him to his environment. Variations on Becoming gives the viewer license to be still, to linger, and to rest while being held by the prairie around them. It is in these moments of stillness that he believes that ideas reciprocity and wonder for the natural world can take root.
Variations on Becoming is located on occupied Anishinabewaki and Wahpekute Land. Please consider a donation to Dream of Wild Health, an Indigenous Non-Profit Farm located in Hugo, MN.
https://dreamofwildhealth.org/
Tom Bierlein
@tom_bierlein
Born: Chaska, Minnesota, USA, 1994
Resides: Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Education
Minneapolis College of Art and Design, BFA, 2019